A site for reviews, musings, link sharing, and flash fiction

Ray Bradbury was not my first science-fiction love; that was Isaac Asimov. He was not the writer I read most compulsively; that was (and is) Orson Scott Card. What Bradbury means to me can’t be captured in a simple label. Except, perhaps, most human.

Some fiction inspires me. Some amuses me. Some unsettles me. Bradbury frequently did all three, and he could move me from one to the other within the course of a single short piece. I read Bradbury not to be exalted or brought low, but to come at life from another angle. Often the reaction I have upon finishing a story or essay of his that I’ve never read is: “I’ve thought that way! But I could never put it into words.”

I have a shameful confession to make. I don’t read as much sci-fi and fantasy as I ought to.

When I was a child, my education in those areas came primarily from the legacy my father had built up when he was a boy. He owned stacks on stacks of old pulp paperbacks, a treasure trove for me. I would spend hours browsing through the titles and authors. Even then, though, I would almost always choose something from the same collection of names. Asimov. Bradbury. Christopher. Clarke. Heinlein. Pohl.